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Archive for the tag “Greg Lukianoff”

“It is so broad that it turns every single student and every single faculty member on campus, at least arguably, into harassers,” warns Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He’s talking about sweeping speech codes just imposed by the Departments of Justice and Education on virtually every college campus in the United States.

The new mandate was revealed in a letter from the DOJ and DOE to the University of Montana that states “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal conduct.” The new rules apply to all colleges and universities receiving any sort of federal money, including Pell grants, federally backed student loans, and more. The letter contends the conduct in question need not be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation.” That means that there is effectively no check on what might count as harassment. Course materials, overheard comments, stupid jokes – it’s all potentially actionable.

Lukianoff, the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, hopes that “this is the last straw that causes the universities themselves to start pushing back against this ridiculous over-regulation.” H/T Reason.TV

“The…idea that if you just let people talk, it will be this pit of racist pandemonium…is sort of childish and it oversimplifies. But it is a great justification for having a lot of power over speech,” says Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Lukianoff spoke with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie about his new book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, where he details the slow and steady withering of free expression on America’s college campuses.

In some ways, the modern on-campus free-speech movement dates back to 1993’s “water buffalo incident” at the University of Pennsylvania, where a student was brought up on racial harassment charges for using the term “water buffalo” as an insult. That case led directly to the founding of FIRE, which “defends free speech, due process and basic rights on campus.”

A Stanford Law-trained liberal who blogs at the Huffington Post, Lukianoff insists that by restricting controversial or potentially offensive speech, “you’re putting people into echo chambers” where they only interact with people with whom they already agree. That sort of groupthink is dangerous to a free society, says Lukianoff, but it’s particularly appalling to see it instituted at the nation’s colleges and universities, where the free exchange of ideas is supposed to be the whole point of higher education.

Instead of serving as bastions of free speech and true centers of higher education, US colleges and universities have become the polar opposite — places where censorship reigns and political correctness is enforced by absurd extremists. What happened to make campuses so cloistered? Who will be banned next by the small-minded autocrats masquerading as professors and college administrators? Glenn Reynolds talks turkey with Greg Lukianoff, author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. Hear how higher education is censoring speech and imperiling First Amendment rights on this InstaVision. H/T PJTV